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Katharine Graham, Former Publisher of Washington Post, Dies at 84

Katharine Graham, who transformed The Washington Post from a mediocre newspaper into an American institution and, in the process, transformed herself from a lonely widow into a publishing legend, died today in Boise, Idaho, where she had been hospitalized since being injured in a fall over the weekend. She was 84.

Mrs. Graham suffered a head injury when she fell on a concrete walkway outside a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho, and never regained consciousness. She had gone there for a conference of business and media executives.

Mrs. Graham was one of the most powerful figures in American journalism and, for the last decades of her life, at the pinnacle of Washington's political and social establishments, a position that this shy, diffident wife and mother never imagined she would, or could, occupy.

It was only after she succeeded her father and her husband as publisher that The Washington Post, a newspaper in the nation's capital with a modest circulation and more modest reputation, moved into the front rank of American newspapers, reaching new heights when its unrelenting reporting of the Watergate scandal contributed to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Mrs. Graham's courage in supporting her reporters and editors through the long investigation was critical to its success.

Three years before Watergate, she gave solid backing to The New York Times in a historic confrontation with the federal government when she permitted her editors to join in publishing the secret revelations about the war in Vietnam known as the Pentagon Papers.

"We are deeply saddened by the passing of Katharine Graham, a close friend and honored colleague," said Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman emeritus of The New York Times Company and the publisher of The Times when the Pentagon Papers were printed.

"She will be remembered as a truly remarkable woman, who had a profound effect on the course of events, both at home and abroad," Mr. Sulzberger said in a statement. "Throughout the last half of the 20th century, she used her intelligence, her courage and her wit to transform the landscape of American journalism, and everyone who cares about a free and impartial press will greatly miss her. We certainly will."

Mrs. Graham capped her career when she was 80 years old in 1998 by winning a Pulitzer Prize for biography for her often-painful reminiscence, "Personal History" (Alfred A. Knopf).

Nora Ephron, in her review of the best-selling memoir in The New York Times Book Review, wrote of Mrs. Graham, "the story of her journey from daughter to wife to widow to woman parallels to a surprising degree the history of women in this century."

Mrs. Graham was a car-pooling, socialite mother of four when her husband, Philip L. Graham, committed suicide in 1963. Her father had given Mr. Graham control of The Post and with his death, his widow found herself in a mysterious thicket of corporate politics dominated by men unaccustomed to a woman in the boardroom and highly skeptical of her ability to run a newspaper.

Even Mrs. Graham saw herself at best as only as an interim caretaker who would try to hold on to The Post for her children.

She became something quite different -- the effective steward of a multimillion-dollar communications empire.

"It's sort of like a fairy tale," Mrs. Graham said on being told of her Pulitzer Prize. But her life was its own sort of fairy tale. She was born in New York City on June 16, 1917. Her father, Eugene Meyer, made his fortune on Wall Street, became a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, went on to organize the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and was appointed the first president of the World Bank. Her mother, the former Agnes Ernst, was a tall, self-absorbed woman of intellectual and artistic ambition. She was scathingly critical and often harsh with her daughter, the fourth of five children.

The children were brought up in the traditions of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, the church of presidents, where the Meyers -- Mr. Meyer was Jewish, his wife Lutheran -- had their own pew.

Mrs. Graham remembered a solitary and lonely childhood in palatial houses in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and in Washington. Her father was often away working, her mother traveling and writing letters home about her social conquests.

In the absence of maternal warmth and support, Katharine became attached to her governess. Later, she went to the Madeira School for Girls in Virginia. She spent two years at Vassar before transferring to the University of Chicago. Neither of her parents attended her graduation in 1938.

When Katharine was 16, no one thought to tell her that her father bid $825,000 at public auction to buy the bankrupt Washington Post, a paper with a circulation of 50,000 that was losing a million dollars a year, the fifth newspaper in a five-newspaper town. Later, with yearnings of her own to get into journalism, she took a job at The San Francisco News before going to The Post to work on the editorial page and handle letters to the editor. "If it doesn't work, well, get rid of her," her father said.

'The Tail to His Kite'

Washington, in 1939, was full of young people converging on the capital to work for The New Deal. Among them was Philip L. Graham of Florida, a brilliant lawyer and a clerk at the Supreme Court, first for Justice Stanley Reed and then for Felix Frankfurter. Shy and insecure, Katharine Meyer could not believe her luck when he asked her to marry him. The heiress agreed to his terms -- that they return to Florida and his father's dairy business, provided, she remembered, "I could live with only two dresses because I had to understand that he would never take anything from my father or be involved with him and we would live on what he made."

It did not work out that way, and Mr. Graham soon accepted his father-in-law's invitation to join The Post. He became associate publisher at 30 and publisher at 31. Mr. Meyer also arranged for him to hold more stock in the company than his daughter because, he explained to her, "no man should be in the position of working for his wife." Mrs. Graham did not object because she knew how important it was to her father to keep The Post in the family, and, she wrote, "in those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male."

Mrs. Graham was belittled and silenced by a husband she adored, the man she called "the fizz" in her life. When he drank too much, gave vent to his rage or frequently became ill, she attributed it to the pressure of his work and not to a serious emotional affliction that had not yet been identified.

"Our relationship resembled that of a chief executive officer Phil and a chief operating officer me," Mrs. Graham wrote in her memoir.

In addition to handling all domestic matters, she paid all their living expenses from her own trust fund so her husband could pay back the debt he incurred buying even more Post stock.

Mr. Graham was immersed in building up The Washington Post, conducting negotiations to buy the rival Times-Herald and merging it with his paper, and waging political battles as The Post took on Senator Joseph McCarthy and his brand of anti-communism. Later Mr. Graham became an even more influential figure in Washington, a close friend of President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

"I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality," Mrs. Graham wrote.

Mr. Graham had his first breakdown in 1957.

His recovery was slow, but he eventually re-emerged into Washington life. In 1961, at the urging of Benjamin C. Bradlee, a young reporter at Newsweek, he negotiated the purchase of the weekly news magazine. He also added television stations to the company's holdings.

What his wife later described as his "hyperactivity, rage and irrationality" grew. Mrs. Graham was shattered when she discovered her husband was having an affair with a Newsweek employee. But there was an added blow: she discovered he had developed a scheme to pay her off and take ownership of The Post, in which he already had controlling interest because her father had given him the majority of the Post's class A shares.

But she decided to fight back. She resolved not to give her husband a divorce unless he gave up enough controlling stock in the Post to give her majority interest.

Mr. Graham became increasingly ill and was in and out of a mental hospital.

Finally, his illness had a name, manic depression. The kinds of drugs that were later developed for his condition were not available then, and Mr. Graham, on the advice of his psychiatrist, refused such drugs that were in use. In August 1963, while on a weekend leave from the hospital, Philip Graham, then 48 years old, took one of his hunting rifles and shot himself to death at their farm in Virginia.

As she mourned, the 46-year-old widow sought ways to hold on to The Post until her sons were old enough to run it. (Her daughter was not a candidate in her plan). Mrs. Graham wrote that she was startled when her friend Luvie Pearson, the wife of the columnist Drew Pearson, told her to run the paper herself. "Don't be silly, dear. You can do it," Mrs. Pearson told her. "You've got all those genes. . . . You've just been pushed down so far you don't recognize what you can do."

Mrs. Graham met with the directors of The Post a month after her husband's death and told them that the paper would not be sold and that it would remain in the family. She was elected president of the company, but she felt "abysmally ignorant" about how to proceed.

She said she was embarrassed to talk to her own reporters, timid in dealing with the paper's executives and uncomfortable with balance sheets. She later wrote that Warren E. Buffett, who was to become her financial mentor, once told a group that he had seen a sheet of paper prominently displayed on her desk that said, "Assets on the left, liabilities on the right." And that was 10 years after she had taken over. Both at The Post and in the wider journalistic community, Mrs. Graham was usually the only woman at meetings and dinners. The men hardly knew what to make of her.

Although she had absorbed a great deal over the years from both her father and her husband, she did not feel up to the job as she tried to learn from the top. With the advice and support of friends like the columnists Walter Lippmann and James Reston, she began to feel some level of comfort at The Post, but she still felt shaky at Newsweek, where she went through a series of hirings and firings that some staff members recall as creating havoc at the magazine.

Two years after taking over The Post, she appointed Mr. Bradlee, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, as executive editor. They made a formidable team, propelling The Post into one of its most dynamic periods. With her backing, he forged a staff of reporters and editors and put out a breezy, gutsy paper that investigated government with gusto. A saucy, impertinent Style section appeared that would soon be imitated by competitors but never matched. Mr. Bradlee's brassy style galvanized his staff and invigorated his publisher.

"She committed the paper to whatever its excellence is," Mr. Bradlee said. "She was the heart and soul of the place."

'The Most Powerful Woman'

As Mrs. Graham struggled to take hold at The Post, she slowly started putting her personal life together. Truman Capote gave what could only be called a coming-out party for her, the Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which not only was the social event of the 1966 season, but also a masked ball of such glamour that it is considered one of the legendary parties of the 20th century.

Mrs. Graham's memoir quoted Gerald Clarke, one of Mr. Capote's biographers, as saying: "She was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolize her emergence from her dead husband's shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world."

In 1969, and still with considerable trepidation, Mrs. Graham added the title of publisher to her position as president of the Washington Post Company. In June 1971, The New York Times started publishing the secret history of decision-making during the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. After a few days, a federal judge put The Times under a temporary restraining order, the first time in American history that an order of prior restraint was imposed.

The editors and reporters at The Post scrambled to get their own copy of the Pentagon Papers. There was a crisis atmosphere, for at the same time the Washington Post Company was preparing an initial public offering of its stock, raising concerns that the company could face harsh retribution from federal regulators if it published the Pentagon Papers while The New York Times was enjoined. When the Post obtained its own copy, it was left to Mrs. Graham, as publisher, to decide whether to risk publication.

The editors and reporters urged her to publish the papers, but the lawyers suggested waiting, fearing that the whole company -- its newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations -- was at stake. Mrs. Graham later wrote: "Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, 'Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let's go. Let's publish.' "

When the issue got to the United States Supreme Court, the cases for The Times and The Post were heard together and the justices voted 6 to 3 in June 1971 against restraining publication of the Pentagon Papers on the ground of endangering national security. That vote is considered a major triumph for freedom of the press.

Ben Bradlee called the publication of the Pentagon Papers a key moment in the life of the newspaper. "It was just sort of the graduation of the Post into the highest ranks," he said. "One of our unspoken goals was to get the world to refer to The Post and New York Times in the same breath, which they previously hadn't done. After the Pentagon Papers, they did."

Weathering Watergate

On June 17, 1972, five months before Nixon's re-election, five men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. The Post began an intense investigation that eventually connected the break-in to the White House.

In the face of intimidation by the Nixon administration, The Post relentlessly published front-page articles by two little-known reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and complemented them with editorials and Herblock cartoons. It eventually proved that what the Nixon administration characterized as a "third-rate burglary" was, instead, a scheme directed from the White House to illegally gather intelligence on the Democratic Party, discredit opponents of the administration and subvert the democratic political process.

In the course of the paper's investigation, the licenses of two of the company's television stations were challenged. Mrs. Graham was also threatened with unspecified retaliation if The Post published an article that said John Mitchell, when he was attorney general, controlled a secret fund that was used to spy on the Democrats. Mr. Mitchell crudely warned Mr. Bernstein that "Katie Graham" would have a breast "caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." Bob Woodward later presented Mrs. Graham with an old-fashioned wooden laundry wringer, which she kept in her office ever after.

At the beginning of the next year the Watergate burglars pleaded guilty, and one of them, hoping to get a more lenient sentence, wrote to John J. Sirica, a federal district judge, to inform him that perjury had been committed and that higher-ups were behind the break-in. That letter vindicated the time and space The Post had devoted to the scandal. For its Watergate reporting, the newspaper was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service.

Meanwhile, the Senate had established a committee to investigate the scandal and a special prosecutor was appointed. In April 1973, Nixon publicly accepted some of the responsibility, but just how responsible he was did not become clear until July, when it was disclosed that a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office had recorded his every word. The tapes revealed that six days after the break-in, the president had personally ordered a cover-up. Nixon resigned in August 1974.

Mrs. Graham later wrote: "Without the tapes, the true story would never have emerged. In fact, I believe that we at The Post were really saved in the end by the tapes and the lucky chance that they weren't destroyed."

Meeting the Elite

In time, as Mrs. Graham became more comfortable with her ability to exercise power, she took trips to confer with foreign leaders, usually accompanied by one of the reporters and her friend Meg Greenfield, who was editor of the editorial page of The Post and a columnist for Newsweek.

Mrs. Graham liked to tell the story of her visit to a village in the Ivory Coast where the chief exclaimed what an honor it was to have with them the 17th most important person in the world, a description that she said he had apparently picked up from a poll that had appeared in U.S. News & World Report.

In Washington, she started to entertain the political elite at her home in Georgetown and an invitation from her came to be seen as second only to an invitation to the White House. By the time of her 70th birthday party, which was attended by the "A" list of the world, she had become such a powerful figure that Art Buchwald said in his toast, "There is one word that brings us all together here tonight. And that word is 'fear.' "

She counted among her close friends movers and shakers like Robert S. McNamara, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, but there was scant sign that her friendships influenced news coverage. She held to her belief that the establishment in which she had been nurtured would do what was right for the country, even when her own paper reported evidence to the contrary.

With the help of the women's movement, and particularly through discussions with Gloria Steinem, Mrs. Graham said she became more cognizant of the causes of her own insecurities and more aware of the problems of working women. She played a signal role in changing Washington mores when it became widely known that on one evening after dinner, she had refused to join the ladies upstairs while the men discussed world affairs over brandy and cigars.

And more women were added to the staffs of both The Post and Newsweek, partly because Mrs. Graham came to understand it was necessary, partly as a result of lawsuits, and partly because of a new climate throughout the country.

Over the years, she found a little time for a personal life. She was courted by a number of men, among them Adlai E. Stevenson after his failed runs for the presidency. She enjoyed weekends at her homes in Virginia and Martha's Vineyard, often in the company of her grandchildren.

Besides her son, Donald, Mrs. Graham is survived by her daughter, Elizabeth Weymouth, known as Lally; her sons William and Stephen; a sister, Ruth Epstein, of Bronxville, N.Y., 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

The Business of News

Mrs. Graham's resolve on editorial questions often contrasted with indecisiveness on business matters. In the 1970's, she remembered that she hired and dismissed top executives too often. From 1971 to 1982, she appointed five new editors at Newsweek, four new newspaper division presidents and three company presidents.

In the early 1970's, Mrs. Graham and her associates tried to make the Washington Post Company more profitable. Newsweek took the lead among news magazines in increasing subscription and newsstand prices. But holding down costs at The Washington Post led to a bitter confrontation with the mechanical unions.

The clash came in October 1975, when the newspaper's pressmen went on strike after contract talks broke down. As the pressmen, members of Local 6 of the Newspaper and Graphic Communications Union, began their walkout, all 72 of the newspaper's presses were vandalized in an attempt to make it impossible to publish.

Although the paper failed to publish on the first day, a truncated issue appeared the next day.

In the face of threats from the striking workers and occasional physical attacks, the reporters voted to stay on the job. Executives handled everything from the classified advertising department to the mailroom and even the presses when they were repaired. Helicopters landed on the roof of The Post building to ferry copy to presses in Maryland and Virginia. It took nearly a month to repair the presses, but The Post continued to appear.

A key factor in The Post's ability to publish during the strike was that most of the drivers who delivered the paper were not unionized and were willing to work. New press operators were hired, and the pressmen's union was devastated.

In anticipation of labor problems, the newspaper had been secretly training executives in a school in Oklahoma City to operate the machinery of newspaper production, including the presses. Mrs. Graham, a one-time labor supporter, drew criticism from liberal friends as a union-buster.

During the strike, Mrs. Graham and Mark Meagher, then her general manager, went to a competitor, the financially troubled Washington Star, to ask Joe L. Allbritton, its owner, to support The Post's position and allow The Post to be printed on his presses or, if necessary, to shut down along with The Post. Mr. Allbritton, who felt The Star could not survive even a brief shutdown, refused.

Mrs. Graham not only went on to win the battle of automation of her newspaper, but also to have the final word on The Star. By 1981, The Post had 75 percent of the city's advertising linage, and The Star, which Mr. Allbritton had sold to Time Inc., was forced to close. Mrs. Graham immediately purchased The Star's plant in Washington and, by the end of 1981, The Post's daily circulation had soared to 984,000 from 771,000.

Donald Graham succeeded his mother as publisher in 1979 and chief executive of the company in 1991, a company which by then was valued at nearly $2 billion.

Mrs. Graham stepped down as chairwoman of the board in 1993, again to be succeeded by her son, but remained on the board as chairwoman of the executive committee.

Mrs. Graham served on the board of The Associated Press, and was chairwoman and president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, director of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau Inc. and a trustee of George Washington University, the University of Chicago and the Urban Institute.

Finally, she seemed comfortable in her own skin. "Worry, if not gone altogether, no longer haunts you in the middle of the night," she wrote. "And you are free -- or freer -- to turn down the things that bore you and spend time on matters and with people you enjoy."

And she did, till the end. Just two weeks ago she was surrounded by friends at the annual party her daughter gives for her in Southampton, N.Y., and last week was in Idaho for a conference of media executives where she saw more friends and colleagues.

She was on her way to a bridge game when she collapsed and never recovered.

Katharine Graham's life ended the way she said she wanted it to: "The only thing I think any of us want," she once said, "is to last as long as we're any good.

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A version of this obituary appears in print on July 17, 2001 of the National edition with the headline: Katharine Graham, Former Publisher of Washington Post, Dies at 84. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe